arrange • compose • conduct
One of the best things I did in the Long Quiet was to take advantage of the lack of concerts to get more involved in my sons’ Scout Troop. Thought my eldest has been involved for four years, I have only rarely been able to attend a meeting (Aces rehearsals) […]
Replayability (also known as Replay Value) is a measure of how much enjoyment people continue to have with a game that they have already spent time playing. Chess has a high level of replayability. Candyland has a low level of replayability, unless you’re five. It’s also one of the factors […]
The longer I write music, the more I think in terms of timbre minimum. Timbre, to my ears, is more important than specific voicing. What kind of sound is it? Is it unison? 2-part? 4-part close position? 4-part open position? 6-part? Is it vocal percussion, vocal bass, and three part […]
Leaders aren’t the ones who are in charge. They’re the ones with the courage to go first. Simon Sinek, in A Bit of Optimism, Episode 6 Leadership is about the courage to go first. Asking the singers around you to quiet down in rehearsal is an act of leadership. Speaking […]
A memory came up yesterday of me with my students on the elementary playground, nine years ago. This was at the end of a long week of rehearsals, preparing for our arrival at the 2012 World Choir Games on July 4. As I remember it, the Aces had worked incredibly […]
Would you program something that is “too hard” for your choir? I mean: too hard to sing flawlessly. Too hard to perform without the occasional tuning error. I don’t program music that is too hard in the sense of: requires professional tessitura or vocal control; requires advanced vocal techniques; is […]
More and more, I’m enamored with chords I can’t label under a triadic/diatonic/jazz framework. They might be quartal chords, whose labels never seem to quite successfully describe how they work. They might be the passing clustery nonsense in Alice Parker’s arrangement of “Vive L’Amour“, which work great because of the […]
The branches on every deciduous tree in my yard are hanging so low right now. After days of rain, every leaf and every stem has absorbed as much water as it can, and the net effect is hundreds of extra pounds of weight for every tree. When the rain stops, […]
There are many ways to celebrate success in video games. Beat your friends! Get the high score! (If I could have ever just gotten past the final Bowser on 8-4, I would have counted it as ultimate success…) One way of measuring success in recent years is speed running. A […]
What does it mean when you say, “I wouldn’t be good at that”? I see a few different possibilities: I’m not good at it now, and I’m unable to imagine that changing. I’m not good at it now, and I am unwilling to put in the effort I know it […]